The American philosopher John Dewey wrote another of my favorite philosophy passages in the last paragraph of his 1898 essay Evolution and Ethics. Dewey articulates in this paragraph what he sees as a monumental leap …
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon …
Art and the Evolution of Consciousness
Did you know that American Avant-Garde painters, writers and musicians in the 1950’s were inspired by evolutionary philosophy? I just completed a weekend program with a group that I co-teach called The Evolutionary Collective and …
Everything Exists in Relationship
Things do not exist unless they exist in relationship with something else. In fact, things do not exist at all. Relationships exist. There are no individual things. The existence of anything is always contingent upon …
Is a Dog Really a Dog?
One of the great philosophical dividing lines has always been the line that separates the particular from the universal – the unique from the general. We live in a world of both particulars and universals …
Into The Human Flow
I am currently completely captivated by the image of a Human Flow. The American Pragmatist philosophers developed a view of humanity as a constant flow of activity and society was a flow of flows. There …
We are the Conscious Part of the Universe
Now that I have got out some of my thoughts about the nature of truth I thought that I would respond directly to some of Chuck R’s earlier comment. (This is how this diversion got …
Cosmos, Consciousness and Culture
It was almost exactly one year ago today that I started this blog so I guess this is my first anniversary post. I started the blog because I wanted to explore the relationship between classical …
Riding the Currents on the Ocean of Mind
I can describe the beautiful image that built in my mind as I read John Dewey’s book “Experience and Nature” by describing a vision of reality as currents in the ocean of mind. Think of …
Communication and the Mind
I still have a few more thoughts about John Dewey’s profound book “Experience and Nature” to develop in this post and the next before I get to explain what hit me while I was reading …
Embracing Constant Flux
I am on a roll with John Dewey. I was reading through his book “Experience and Nature” for the second time and something finally clicked and I started to see what he was getting at. …
The Individual and Society
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 –1831) was a leading figure in the movement of German Idealism initiated by Immanuel Kant and Hegel’s philosophy expanded on Kant’s theory of knowledge by adding a social and historical …
The Evolution of Freedom in the Universe
I am inspired by all of your thoughtful and provocative comments to my last post and captivated by this idea that what we experience as freewill is not actually a quality of a human being, …
What is a “something” anyway? further consideration of Darwin and Dewey
In my last post I wrote about Darwin’s recognition that the idea of separate species was just that, an idea. And, as Brian astutely commented on that post, that doesn’t mean that there is no …
Darwin and the Illusion of Separate Species
The American Pragmatists were all profoundly influenced by Darwin’s publication of “On the Origin of Species.” The originators of Pragmatism, including Charles Sanders Peirce who coined the term and William James who popularized it, were …
John Dewey and the Unity of Mind and Matter
One of the challenges of the philosophy of Pragmatism is that it is too easy to reduce its complexity and subtlety to simple utilitarianism. Some of the same language that William James used to almost …
The Curious Case of John Elof Boodin vs. Charles Darwin
The American philosophy of Pragmatism was in many ways a direct response to Darwin’s publication of “On the Origin of Species.” The early Pragmatists were trying to apply the same logic to philosophy that Darwin …